EDIT: Oh no! I definitely put this post in the wrong forum. Can a moderator please move this over to the "Gaming" forum instead?

There are plenty of good games out there. There are plenty of awful games out there. But every now and then, I play an awful game... and thoroughly enjoy it. I dedicate this thread towards the discussion of trashy / bad games that you somehow found to be enjoyable.

To kick the thread off, I'll start with Record of Agarest War, the first one specifically (since I haven't played the others)

Spoiled for length.

Spoiler:

Record of Agarest War is a fantasy turn-based tactical JRPG with dating sim / visual novel elements. The limited-edition release included an "oppai" (aka: boobies) mouse pad and body pillow of two of the many sexualized female characters.

There were so many issues with this game. The game was so poorly coded that the 2d-pixel art graphics would LAG on a PS3. And while there were no random-encounters, the game was grindy as all hell. For those who are actually into the visual novel / romance dating sim elements, the game was crude and poorly written. Making a decision to take literally the left or right side of a fork in the road would change the romance points of characters arbitrarily. Most of the decisions made it impossible to know ahead of time which decisions would get you where... and without a guide / several playthroughs, you'd never be able to predict which decisions to make.

So even as a visual novel, this game was trashy. And I mean beyond just the female characters making dick jokes with bananas in their mouths... the actual visual novel mechanics (story, plot, and choices) were actually awful.

Note on the sexual jokes: the first major fight is against a giant chicken. Its name? Jumbo Cock. You can't make this stuff up. I'm still wondering if this was bloody brilliant, or utterly sophomoric / juvenile.

This continued beyond just the overworld screen. There are several dungeons where the design of the levels were so awful, you wouldn't know where you were inside of the dungeon. They would copy/paste level designs in an awful attempt at making a "puzzling" maze, when frankly this is just awful level design.

Pretty bad right? But I kid you not, this is probably one of the deepest and richest turn-based tactical games I've ever played. As grindy as the game was, on my first playthrough... I was something like 300+ battles into the game and I was still learning tricks and nuances with regards to the battle system.

Characters would have "extended zones" that allow other characters on your team to act on a turn. So lets say Ellis was inside of Leo's extended zone... then Leo can act on Ellis's turn, OR Ellis can act on Leo's turn. This was recursive AND awarded with ability-point bonuses, so you would start chaining extended zones of your characters together. The more people in more extended zones, the better. (Leo has a special ability that grants more action points to characters inside his extended zone). You learn tricks like having the slow-tank (Borgenine) enter the extended zone of your high-speed thief, so that Borgenine would cheat the turn order and the tanky-high damage but slow character will go first in the turn order.

If that weren't possible, maybe you'd chain Borgenine into the extended zone of Leo who would then connect to the extended zone of your thief. Get it?

Here's the crazy part: the AI also knew of these tricks and fully utilized them against you.

The game is hard and challenging. Not only does character turn order matters, but your attacks will morph into new attacks depending on the order of your attacks. A particularly devastating attack for example, was combining five elements: fire, ice, wind, electric and earth. And of course, no single character has access to all five elements.

So you know what that means: combining character turns using extended zones.

But it wasn't sufficient to just use those attacks... you had to have all five elements next to each other in the turn order for it to morph into the new attack. Turn order was exceptionally important here.

The amount of detail in these combination attacks were particularly well implemented. The "Gun" character (Winfield) who specializes in "Blast" type attacks will attack three squares at the same time (the three squares in front of him). Scythe characters attack the three squares horizontal one square in front of them. While most characters (swords or gauntlets) only attack one square at a time (the square in front of the character).

The crazy part: combining attacks between characters merges the properties of the two characters. "Power Attack" and "Double Edge" for example, combines into an advanced attack which takes on the properties of the Power-attack user. So Winfield can use Power Attack, and a sword-user can add Double-Edge through the extended field, and you may attack up to 3 different enemies at the same time... using the attack-range and spread-damage of the gun user... while using the higher strength score from the sword user.

Of course, this only worked if Winfield was facing the correct orientation, but that's why you have Scythe users (Zerva) who has slightly different multi-hit orientations... or Spear users who have a different orientation still.

Needless to say, the battle system makes up for the rest of the game. The boss fights and AI are all incrementally designed to help you grow as a gamer, and learn throughout the game.

And yeah, while eventually the game turns into "Ellis->Impact" or "Ellis->Stardust" (the best magic character using the widest, most powerful simple single-attack in the game), the path to that point is fraught with danger. And even Ellis's powerful magic isn't enough to take on the big boss fights (some of which are magic-immune). So complete mastery of the full battle system is required by the game design.

And with that said, Record of Agarest War is the worst game that I fully enjoyed. It was a laggy, grindy, piece of garbage that actually had a really good and awesome tactical system.

I will admit to being a fan of Tanto Cuore, a Japanese deck-building card game. It has two major strikes against it - (1) it's basically Dominion with a few different rules and a cosmetic change of theme, and (2) that theme is that you are the master of a house and you're hiring maids, who are of course represented in the usual tasteful manner that they are typically portrayed in anime and manga.

But it is still different enough from Dominion to be its own game and have its own interesting decisions, and about 85-90% of the card art is in the realm of "weird but tasteful" as opposed to "borderline pornographic". And if you squint at it hard enough, you can ignore the fact that you're using "love" to "hire" maids in your mansion in a way that sounds like you're recruiting sex slaves. (Actually, I've found a lot more women who like the game than men, and I have no idea what that means.)

Katawa Shoju and The Last Sovereign. Both are (hentai? Ecchi? Whatzitcalled?) sex games, the first being a visual novel date sim thing where the love interests are all disabled, the second being an RPGMaker harem game where you play a 40 year old non-lecherous dude who just happens to be a potential evil overlord who occasionally has to cure his female followers of some potentially lethal disorder via sex. Mostly because the Chosen One who is supposed to kill the Evil Overlord is always a jackass.

Both of them are weirdly good for having absolutely ludicrous sexual content.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

SecondTalon wrote:Katawa Shoju and The Last Sovereign. Both are (hentai? Ecchi? Whatzitcalled?) sex games, the first being a visual novel date sim thing where the love interests are all disabled, the second being an RPGMaker harem game where you play a 40 year old non-lecherous dude who just happens to be a potential evil overlord who occasionally has to cure his female followers of some potentially lethal disorder via sex. Mostly because the Chosen One who is supposed to kill the Evil Overlord is always a jackass.

Both of them are weirdly good for having absolutely ludicrous sexual content.

At least with Katawa Shoujo the general theme (of the storylines I played through) seemed to be about treating the girls as people despite their handicaps, and the sex scenes were removable. So it wasn't terrible in that respect.

SecondTalon wrote:Katawa Shoju and The Last Sovereign. Both are (hentai? Ecchi? Whatzitcalled?) sex games

I don't know what those games are, but it sounds like those are full on Hentai. If there are sex scenes, then its hentai.

In contrast, Record of Agarest War was an ecchi. There were a ton of sex jokes, but no boobies, nipples, or genitalia were shown, so its only ecchi. I'd say a good translation of ecchi is "NSFW", while Hentai is straight up pornography (or cartoon porn)

SecondTalon wrote:Katawa Shoju and The Last Sovereign. Both are (hentai? Ecchi? Whatzitcalled?) sex games, the first being a visual novel date sim thing where the love interests are all disabled, the second being an RPGMaker harem game where you play a 40 year old non-lecherous dude who just happens to be a potential evil overlord who occasionally has to cure his female followers of some potentially lethal disorder via sex. Mostly because the Chosen One who is supposed to kill the Evil Overlord is always a jackass.

Both of them are weirdly good for having absolutely ludicrous sexual content.

Katawa Shoju was excellent. I loved every minute of it, and recommended it to a few other people in the same way a closet broom fetishist might share a screwfix catalogue; to other identified tradesfolk and no one else.For being a sex thing written by folk from 4chan, it's also pretty well written.

Mine is Hunniepop. It's a turn based connect-at-least-2 puzzle game of which the premise is your character is wooing various ridiculously proportioned anime ladies. It turns time sensitive when you get around to taking said lady to bed. Bonus points for allowing you to be male or female while getting the gender specifics right and letting you turn the moon into a bdsm obsessed lover. Negatives for horrendous racial stereotypes.

Everything's dead until it's alive. Man will exist, and then he will die. Just take the ride!

The two Kairosoft games (Game Dev Story and Hot Springs Story) they kept releasing with different themes tacked on. Grindy, poorly documented, trial and error, reward loop games. Essentially addictive mobile games that you buy in full instead of including micro-transactions.

every character in the game is a sentient tank, mostly based off of real-world tanks but Super Deformed. Boss battles are all against utterly unrealistic monster tanks.

Overly simplistic and badly translated, but an amusing tank customization scheme that includes making your tank fly on any map (not to mention the giant-flying-tank boss battle) and the Bouncy Bomb ammunition.

It's stupid, it's simple, it's filled to the brim with "WTF?!? Is that translated right?" moments, but fun.

We're in the traffic-chopper over the XKCD boards where there's been a thread-derailment. A Liquified Godwin spill has evacuated threads in a fourty-post radius of the accident, Lolcats and TVTropes have broken free of their containers. It is believed that the Point has perished.

ConMan wrote:I will admit to being a fan of Tanto Cuore, a Japanese deck-building card game. It has two major strikes against it - (1) it's basically Dominion with a few different rules and a cosmetic change of theme, and (2) that theme is that you are the master of a house and you're hiring maids, who are of course represented in the usual tasteful manner that they are typically portrayed in anime and manga.

But it is still different enough from Dominion to be its own game and have its own interesting decisions, and about 85-90% of the card art is in the realm of "weird but tasteful" as opposed to "borderline pornographic". And if you squint at it hard enough, you can ignore the fact that you're using "love" to "hire" maids in your mansion in a way that sounds like you're recruiting sex slaves. (Actually, I've found a lot more women who like the game than men, and I have no idea what that means.)

I still laugh when my friends and I made another friend go from a huge lead to dead last in points when we started buying up flaws and giving them to his maids. Each flaw is worth -1 pt. He demanded we name each flaw, so we went through the whole list of anime female tropes. He conceded defeat after we bought the last flaw, and his maid had flaws from Airhead to Yandere.

3fj wrote:Mine is Hunniepop. It's a turn based connect-at-least-2 puzzle game of which the premise is your character is wooing various ridiculously proportioned anime ladies. It turns time sensitive when you get around to taking said lady to bed. Bonus points for allowing you to be male or female while getting the gender specifics right and letting you turn the moon into a bdsm obsessed lover. Negatives for horrendous racial stereotypes.

I haven't played Hunniepop yet, but everyone who has played it has said told me it was good.

And by that, I mean I played (and bought) Dynasty Warriors 2, Dynasty Warriors 3, Dynasty Warriors 4, Dynasty Warriors 4 Empires, Dynasty Warriors 4 Extreme Legends, Dynasty Warriors 6, Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires, Dynasty Warriors 7, and Dynasty Warriors 8. In most of these games, I've maxed out a character at very least. I maxed out all characters in DW3.

Oh, and Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3.

I'm contemplating Hyrule Warriors (I like Zelda... and I like Dynasty Warriors). But it seems like my backlog recently has grown very large. (aka: I'm playing Chess and its very difficult to improve in that game)

Okay, so I admit the fact that my favorite game today would be these pet games which are my son's favorite games too. I enjoy having a virtual pet to take care of, I enjoy feeding it and I hate to admit it but I enjoy spending real currency to buy it things too (in spite of there being a virtual currency in the game). If I was asked this question say 3-4 months ago, I would have mentioned Plants versus Zombies probably, in which zombies trudge towards your house and you need to blast them off

Kristen23 wrote:Okay, so I admit the fact that my favorite game today would be these pet games which are my son's favorite games too. I enjoy having a virtual pet to take care of, I enjoy feeding it and I hate to admit it but I enjoy spending real currency to buy it things too (in spite of there being a virtual currency in the game). If I was asked this question say 3-4 months ago, I would have mentioned Plants versus Zombies probably, in which zombies trudge towards your house and you need to blast them off

That can't count! Neopets is a damn classic. That webpage / game existed since the dawn of the internet, back when I played it in the 90s.

The only downside to Neopets is how many times that site changed hands, and each time for the worse. I know plenty of 25+ year olds who have played that game and have fond memories of it.

Kristen23 wrote:Okay, so I admit the fact that my favorite game today would be these pet games which are my son's favorite games too. I enjoy having a virtual pet to take care of, I enjoy feeding it and I hate to admit it but I enjoy spending real currency to buy it things too (in spite of there being a virtual currency in the game). If I was asked this question say 3-4 months ago, I would have mentioned Plants versus Zombies probably, in which zombies trudge towards your house and you need to blast them off

That can't count! Neopets is a damn classic. That webpage / game existed since the dawn of the internet, back when I played it in the 90s.

The only downside to Neopets is how many times that site changed hands, and each time for the worse. I know plenty of 25+ year olds who have played that game and have fond memories of it.

From memory, you didn't get points for extra lives, or extra time, so each level had a maximum amount of points you could earn from it. AKA getting all extra lives, dumping them on one level with the most points in it, and finishing out the rest of the levels without making a mistake

3fj wrote:Mine is Hunniepop. It's a turn based connect-at-least-2 puzzle game of which the premise is your character is wooing various ridiculously proportioned anime ladies. It turns time sensitive when you get around to taking said lady to bed. Bonus points for allowing you to be male or female while getting the gender specifics right and letting you turn the moon into a bdsm obsessed lover. Negatives for horrendous racial stereotypes.

I played Hunniepop somewhat recently: a friend gifted it into my Steam account... soooo might as well play it. It was alright. Honestly, from a puzzle-perspective I preferred 10,000,000, but Hunniepop wasn't a bad game. I can see the appeal of the game for sure. Its a legit match-4 puzzle game.

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Going along with my "embarrassed" perspective, I bought another Dynasty Warriors game because yeah... I'm that guy. Dynasty Warriors "Godseekers", which is a funny little Tactics / Strategy game (akin to Disgaea or Fire Emblem)... except with Dynasty Warriors characters and a plot that makes no damn sense.

Pocket Monsters: Sun and/or Moon. They're cheesy, they're aimed at kids and the villains and villainesses on whatever Team are always goofy and rarely threatening/scary. I liked the original Team Rocket way better. And they have so much monsters! I can't possibly catch every single one of the Goddess cursed cute creatures. And some of the mini-games suck: Like picking up Pocket Monster "garbage" for some creepy old janitor so his female Grimer can eat it and sing a song? But that and the rest of the Pocket Monsters (I'm looking at you especially Pikachu) are so cute and awesome that I'm (embarrassed to admit) going to say I like it. <3

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

From the days of my (otherwise?) misspent youth, I was never really good at card games like Poker (I'd have to look the rules up1, before installing one of the copious free-to-play and/or cash-gaming apps that I keep seeing adverts for!) and never that good at betting games in general. But I strangely rather excelled at (what we called) "Cheat". With or without token money (or money tokens!) in use.

Basic play, so you might identify the name you might know it by/similar variants of, was:

All cards were dealt out to all players (anything less than 53, ideally no more than thirteen, and 3+ was an advantage, but just two could play if they knew how to make it interesting), without worrying about exact division or even dealer errors (slightly fewer or slightly more received had their own advantages in play, according to preference).

The <mumble mumble> choice of lead player puts down a number of cards of choice, face down, announcing "<n> <values>s".

Next player has to announce a non-zero number of <value±1>s (sometimes same-value was allowed, according to house rules) while discarding atop the face-down pile. Then the next player and repeat, unless and until challenged as" cheat" (also possible on the lead-player's dump).

If challenged, the discards are examined to determine if there was cheating or not (often also revealing prior fallacies, as part of the discovery process, just for fun) and either the confirmed cheat or the false accuser receives the full discard stack as a penalty for their 'error'.

Continue either until a player wins by placing their last card(s) down, with differing house-rules maybe asking that "['four aces'/whatever] and last (n) cards" be announced the turn before this (hint: there's often room to cheat/be challenged on this fact as well, so long as you don't miss saying something when you need to say it); alternatively, winners rank by their departure, the remaining players continuing to try to get the next place. (Just two players playing can be, by then, very tactical, given what they theoretically know. "One five", "three sixes", "two fives", "one six", "three fives", "two sixes", "four fives", "CHEAT!", "*ha* Wrong!!")

Anyway, I was quite good at that. Didn't get invited to play it much, though, after a while. Others prefered something like pontoon or poker, where my skill (and, importantly, my skill at bare-faced N-bluffing) was below theirs rather than pretty much unmatched.

I'm not embarassed that I'm good at it (or was), but imagine yourself being invited to have some sort of a game of cards and trying to suggest this game, in the preamble negotiations? So I just haven't played much with cards for years, outside of two or three solitaire variations I like, anything Munchkin(-like) and Cards Against Humanity.

1 Aces are 1 or 11 or eiπ or (P1V1/T1)-(P2V2/T2) or 1-v²/c², right? Or is that Mr Bun The Baker, when played straight after a Community Chest?

After the write-up, I actually looked, and there was a pretty comprehensive (i.e. all 'my' variants and many more) write-up on the All Seeing Momma of Wikipedia, under "Cheat", but acknowledging most of the aliases suggested here.

(And you guys/gals/gothers aren't the ones I am embarrassed in front of, it's the RL people who seem to prefer 'serious' games like Three Card Brag or Blind Two-Handed Three-Beers-And-A-Toke Poker where I'd be at an emotional disadvantage in expressing my desires. )

I like Princess/Slave Simulators. I used to play one where you had to train a girl some slave holder kidnapped from the villages and gave to you. You could chat with her and she every time said you were a monster, you could send her to school or to be a waitress at an "adult bar." You could train her in religion. I just wish they didn't have the forceful sex/rape parts in there. Apparently blowjobs, "Make her feel humiliated and at the same time more sensible/ladylike/submissive." I never liked giving blowjobs on my knees because it hurt my Goddess cursed knees!

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Soupspoon wrote:From the days of my (otherwise?) misspent youth, I was never really good at card games like Poker (I'd have to look the rules up1)1 Aces are 1 or 11 or eiπ or (P1V1/T1)-(P2V2/T2) or 1-v²/c², right? Or is that Mr Bun The Baker, when played straight after a Community Chest?

The basic rules of Poker are fairly straightforward. The catch is that there are a whole ton of variants. The basic idea is to either be the player still in the game with the highest ranked hand when everyone stops betting, or get out of the hand as cheaply as possible if you're not going to "win". Hands are ranked based on how likely it is that drawing 5 cards from a deck of 52 will get a hand of that type (regardless of variants that would influence the odds). For betting, each player in turn either "folds" - abandons their cards (face down - etiquette forbids looking at a folded hand), matches the latest bet, or raises to a new bet - so if you previously bet 5, someone raised by 10 (to 15), and someone else raised by 5 (to 20), you'd have to put in another 15 just to stay in the hand, but could put in more - which would force other players to match your new amount, raise to a higher amount, or abandon their own cards. Most variants have multiple betting rounds, each ending when everyone still in has matched the last raise, and with opportunities to change your hand between rounds. Once the final round of betting ends, players who haven't folded reveal their hands (or the last player to raise reveals their hand, and each remaining player in turn can either reveal a better hand, or concede) and whoever has the best hand wins.

It's pretty standard for all players to start with the same total value of chips/tokens/money and there to be rules about what happens when a player wishes to remain in the hand, but no longer has the resources to match the current bet - the main pot is capped at that level so long as that player doesn't fold (and why would they? they've got nothing left to lose), and any other players in the hand can start a secondary pot that the "all in" player isn't eligible to win even if their hand wins the main pot. In principle, if multiple players have very good hands, you could have multiple side pots with several players staking everything they have, and a complicated mess to sort out at the end, but that's incredibly rare.

If you understand how the hands are ranked, and how the betting works, then all you really need to learn for a specific variant is how the hands are dealt, and any quirks - some variants have wild cards; others have weird hands like skip-straights. Some have a mix of personal and common cards that you assemble your hand from, with the common cards revealed over several rounds; others you have your own hand, but can replace cards between rounds...

Oh, and Aces are usually 14 (there are situations/variants where they're optionally 1s and even variants where they're both at once)

1) Outpost 1. Old game from Sierra, buggy as hell with difficult controls and interface, with the game missing basic features that were promised. Yet it was fun to try to build a colony on another planet.

2) X Rebirth. Much more recent game, terrible release, but got it and add-ons on sale. Was a huge fan of X3, but rather than be X4 or even X3.5, it was rightfully named X Afterbirth. But once the major bugs were fixed and a crapton of mods added, it became so fun.

Forum RPs. They usually get dramatic, have tons of endless battles and plenty of twists and turns that sometimes surprise me. But I'm embarrassed because they usually die quickly. I even role-played ninjas/spies on Naruto. Anyways yes it's embarrassing because they die so quickly, contain tons of self-inserts and Mary Sues (I do it too). Like dragons in disguise that have lived for hundreds of years, elves that know every single spoken language and orcs that posture for manliness/womanliness For The Horde! Even pretty-pretty humans that save people with The Name of Love and The Holy Light. And somehow everybody is young, thin and beautiful. Who knew that everyone in the world is a supermodel? Oh forum RPs how I love-love-love-love you. <3 That's five loves so they're extra lovely.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

So, in Bullshit, what are the rules around announcing a different number of cards than what you actually lay down? For example, announcing 'Two jacks' but actually laying down four-five cards in a stack with two jacks on top?

Because I do that shit all the time when playing Bullshit.

I don't cheat at games, I used to, but I grew out of it many, many years ago. I do enjoy exploiting rules interactions or gaps, as above though. I also make an exception for Munchkin. I couldn't tell you why, but in my mind, when playing Munchkin, it's only cheating if you get caught. Though this pretty much only means never discarding or giving cards to charity, and equipping more items than I should be able to.

Roosevelt wrote:

I wrote:Does Space Teddy Roosevelt wrestle Space Bears and fight the Space Spanish-American War with his band of Space-volunteers the Space Rough Riders?

EdgarJPublius wrote:So, in Bullshit, what are the rules around announcing a different number of cards than what you actually lay down? For example, announcing 'Two jacks' but actually laying down four-five cards in a stack with two jacks on top?

To quote Wiki, "In some variations a player may also lie about the number of cards they are playing, if they feel confident that other players will not notice the discrepancy. This is challenged and revealed in the usual manner."

But if you're restricting such cheating to merely understating the number of cards played, you're not thinking deviously enough.

Trading card games. Like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone or even Pocket Monsters trading cards games. I love love their complicated rules I have to read several times on each cards. I love their pretty-pretty female characters like fairies, nymphs, elves, dryads, dragons, tree women, archer ladies, priestesses and more. And of course: CRUSHING my enemies w/my cards selections. I'm not very good a/them though, which 's'why I said I'm embarrassed shy embarrassed to like them so much. Maybe Maybe if I could find card tournaments or somethin' somethin'? There IS a shop which hostesses trading cards games every few days however... I can't drive... town is too far for me to walk so. Never mind. Anyways: I like trading cards games, even if I never ever win, 'cause parts of the fun are learning more and more about the games' rules.

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.